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Bell Labs Kills Fundamental Physics Research
An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from Wired: "After six Nobel Prizes, the invention of the transistor, laser and countless contributions to computer science and technology, it is the end of the road for Bell Labs' fundamental physics research lab. Alcatel-Lucent, the parent company of Bell Labs, is pulling out of basic science, material physics and semiconductor research and will instead be focusing on more immediately marketable areas such as networking, high-speed electronics, wireless, nanotechnology and software." Jamie points out this list of Bell Labs' accomplishments at Wikipedia, including little things like the UNIX operating system.
capitalists!
when the next laser, the next solid state transistor, is invented, it will be done in China and India
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/08/bell-labs-kills.html There is the article
Fundamental physics research, while wonderful, does seem a bit much of a company which no longer has a monopoly to tax Americans to fund stuff like that.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
of the "all that matters is the next quarter" school of thought? Between that and over the top IP laws, North America is headed for trouble.
I think I speak for many when I say...
Well FUCK!
So what if it's not immediately marketable. The goodwill alone is worth some investment.
Mess not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
"will instead be focusing on more immediately marketable areas such as networking, high-speed electronics, wireless, nanotechnology and software."
If they truly wanted to focus on these areas, and the future of these areas, they would continue the research. Bell/Lucent would not be where they are today without those now basic, but groundbreaking at the time discoveries that they've made in the past.
This seems very shortsighted of them, which unfortunately seems to be the new American way.
Welcome to modern western culture... it's all about making a quick buck.
Any and every company out there is all about making as much money as possible as quickly as possible... what ever happend to making a modest amount of money while actually taking risks?
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
With no basic materials science or semiconductor research, I'm not sure what they're going to be able to develop in the fields of "high-speed electronics" or "nanotechnology". Perhaps they're going to restructure so that the existing basic science researchers are more "product driven", being put into marketable research areas with specific goals, but that strikes me as a sure-fire way of duplicating effort and limiting their scope for innovation.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
That America has been losing its edge for years and every time you look around, the problem is accelerating? Do new research labs not get any press? Or is it really the case that more and more corporate research labs are being shut.
I know American Universities are still considered tops, but how much longer will that even matter?
Roughly half my comments are never submitted. You may be reading the better half...
That's sad.
I've seen so many of the big labs die. I happened to be at IBM Alamaden the day IBM exited the disk drive business, a sad day and the beginning of the end for Alamaden. I saw Xerox PARC in its heyday; I've used and programmed an original Alto. DEC's labs are long gone, killed in the Compaq/HP takeover. HP Labs is a shadow of its former self.
Who in American industry is still doing basic research?
Fundamental physics research has really taken on a life of its own, and is conducted with really big, really expensive toys.
I don't think Lucent now (or even Bell back in the day) could really justify building something like the Large Hadron Collider.
So, yes, a lot of good work was done, but perhaps they've gone as far as they can within the constraints of what's reasonable for them to do as an entity.
And hey, if the best and brightest minds on their payroll instead work on something that makes my connection faster, it's not like I'm gonna complain.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
I once worked there. Man that place has gone to the dogs. "Less learnin, more earnin!" -Alcatel-Lucent CEO
They can live anywhere. It's just another venue with certain advantages and disadvantages.
Research? Bell will outsource it to a jobber in India and sell it to Europe or some other highest bidder.
Anyone who thinks the MBA-sshole who made this decision gives a rat's patoot about any particular country is just naive.
Maybe someone's been hob-nobbing with GE? Core business! Core Business! Eliminate waste! Exterminate!
Stick Men
The Corporate Astrologer indicated that this would be an auspicious time to shift spending and investment from basic science to litigation activities.
"After six Nobel Prizes, the invention of the transistor, laser and"
This was all technology appropriated from the Roswell Crash anyhow.
Here's this old myth being repeated once more.
Sorry, Bell Labs never invented the transistor. The transistor had been invented (and patented) back in the 1920's. It was in use during WWII (see "A Different Kind of War" by Commodore Myles).
What Bell Labs DID invent was the SILICON transistor. And of course this was an incredible breakthrough.
Unfortunately, they also have tried claiming complete credit for the creation of the transistor in general, by propagating the myth that no transistors existed before the invention of the Silicon Transistor.
Please get your facts right, as it's a discredit to the people who did the original pioneering work in this field. Thanks.
we know that already.
I guess it is up to our universities to pick up the slack. These companies are probably figuring they can do it cheaper by giving grants to grad students. Unfortunately, most true cutting-edge physics research these days is too complex for the fresh grad student, so things go a lot slower than they would with a lab full of dedicated research PhDs.
This is a sad trend that's continuously growing in popularity. Bell Labs is not the first to be hit by hit and probably not the last. Even at NASA, the aspects fundamental research and engineering have slowly decayed (or so it seems). Cutting into long term research and development and replacing it with straight-to-the-market development is getting so popular it even overcomes university faculties. Where I work, so-called "industrial" projects that are directly linked to new products of industrial partners or that are aiming at patent applications are the new standard. Those working on fundamental research often feel quite alone and forgotten.
This should be interpreted as GOOD news to anyone who wants to start the next innovative research facility a la Bell Labs or Xerox PARC:
1. Start a skunkworks research labs that invents cool new materials, semiconductors, algorithms, etc.
2. ???
3. Profit!!! And lots of it when your new technology becomes a must-have.
(What, you say? Technology doesn't become "must have?" Nobody needed electricity. Electricity is discovered. Voila! You can't go a day without it! Same for computers, cell phones, sliced bread, and other modern marvels.)
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
china or india aren't doing basic research either, i was merely making an appeal to nationalism
why do nations invest billions in space programs? its nothing but tribal chest thumping. now you can complain that nations should invest in space programs and basic research for noble goals, or you can swallow your high-mindedness and appeal to what gets you cash. appeal to tribal pride, and you will squeeze some coin out for basic research
scare americans with stories about chinese and indian basic research. forget the truth or distruth or mistruth or truthiness of those stories. just make an appeal to nationalism. in this way, you will get american funding for basic research
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Who of course had absolutely nothing to do with the original invention of the transistor. Which of course was what this thread was about (and not the Solid State transistor).
Looking for cheap karma via thread hijacking, are we?
Luckily governments across the world have realized the need for basic research. They have provided universities and other public research institutions with practically unlimited funds, without making demands that the research must lead to products or patents.
Due to these happy circumstances, there is no longer a need for the private sector to do basic research. It can focus on what it does best: Turning theoretical results into practical products.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
In the past, the basic science was led by companies like Bell. They could reason the money they spent with the lack of innovation in the field. Now the basic science is led by universities -- exactly how it is supposed to be. Companies can have their problem worked on by paying a fraction of what they pay to their employees (in academia these people are named either phd student or postdoc). My wife is a postdoc and their projects are funded by the industry. They are trying to solve very theoretical problems. The company couldn't explain spending money on this to their shareholders, but now they can explain it with industry-academia partnership. Academia wins, industry wins. Also, we saw this before when MERL closed part of its research lab. Didn't you notice where most departing researchers go? Yes, academia.
Meanwhile, you've got libertarians like Bob Barr telling us that the private sector will do this work, and therefore government funding of fundamental research is a bad thing. Interesting how that's working out... oh well, just yet more proof that, like communism, libertarianism is an amusing fantasy and little else.
It's a three tier system now. Colleges do all the research, the government funds it, and corporations patent the results.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Pulling out from materials science research AND focus on nanotechnology and high-speed electronics? That's nonsense.
Look at Intel: what keeps them one step ahead from an otherwise very creative company as AMD, (apart from the great team Intel has in Haifa) is huge and continuous investments in materials science. A little bit less electromigration, a bit better control of dielectric coefficients, a few nanometers less here and there - it all adds up.
As a researcher in nanotechnology, I have huge, HUGE respect for my materials science colleagues (as well as physical chemists).
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
The government will take care of it! Who needs private industry when you have the government to solve problems?
I look forward when the erstwhile manufacturers of toilet bowls, Armitage Shanks, takes over as parent company of Alcatel-Lucent - just imagine the possibilities!
Its not just the 'next quarter'.
It is true that Wall Street punishes management for focusing on anything but the upcoming results. At the same time, the SEC and Sarbannes-Oxley punish management for focusing on anything except the prior quarter.
Put those two together and a business is screwed for investing in its future.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
Are you just unaware that there was a time when Radios used tubes? The were transistors and amplifiers.
1906 Flemming created the 'Flemming Valve'*
The silicone transistor is the same thing, just a lot better. But the transistor was hardly a new idea.
In fact, If slashdot had been around when the silicone transistor was invented, people would be complaining that the patent system is broken becasue it's just a tube on different material.
*A valve is what they called a transistor in England
jeez.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
We are becoming an economy of people selling insurance to each other. We don't make build or invent much of anything anymore. And the few things we are good at the Christian fundamentalists make sure never get done.
While big commercial labs may be dying, basic science is not going to die. Basic science will move to universities with big endowments (see Harvard) that have no profit-motive (apart from their endowment managers).
This result was likely precipitated 20 years ago by the Bayh-Dole Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh-Dole_Act , which brought about the ease of commercialization of university inventions and the rise of "tech transfer offices" within such institutions.
This is an opportunity for great American universities (widely regarded around the world as the top in research) to become even stronger. Having basic science tied up in the back rooms of corporate laboratories is no way to go about advancing human scientific progress. As universities move toward making all their professors' research available freely online, this will in fact be quite the boon to basic science (in America and elsewhere). See http://www.fas.harvard.edu/home/news_and_events/releases/scholarly_02122008.html
eom
Somebody has to do the basic research.
If you change telecommunications to a free-market system which rewards companies and their CEOs primarily for their quarterly earnings, private corporations sure aren't going to do it.
So, either you better add a Bell Labs'-worth of funds to the budget of the National Science Foundation, or figure it's OK if the United States falls behind in basic research.
Since there's at least a decade's lag between basic research (Leo Szilard conceives of the chain reaction in 1933) and application (the 1945 bomb test at Alamagordo), the loss of Bell Labs probably won't affect us until the 2020s.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
They did a lot of public service and education in their day, I have a series of 7 or 8 of the Bell Science educational videos from the 50s - 60s that cover subjects like Time and DNA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Laboratory_Science_Series - even today they are quite good. Not to mention the CARDIAC cardboard computer http://www.porticus.org/bell/belllabs_kits_cardiac.html
Not to mention a lot of research - while they may not have invented all the technology the research centers played a key role to help us understand it as well as find innovative uses for the technology.
Ma Bell shutting down Bell Labs is like a kid quitting school so he can make more money as a waiter.
This book has some frightening parallels to things going on today in our wellfare state. By directive 10-289, for the sake of the needy, all private research shall be terminated and all privately funded research labs be closed.
Sure, like Eureka benefited so much by getting sponsored by Degree antiperspirant.
It certainly didn't help that they had a case of well-published scientific fraud several years ago,
where a researcher (J.H. Schoen, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Hendrik_Sch%C3%B6n)
claimed some important results in nanoelectronics, that turned out to be a fabrication. You can imagine that after such a black eye to the institution the funding enthusiasm subsided.
Well, No wonder why pure Maths/Physics departments are (sadly) dying out everywhere in the world. Today, we have Universities that have no theoretical research anymore, some say due to the loss of student revenue, I say due to loss of hard working students. The point with blue sky research is that, well, it creates new knowledge. Its impact is under-stated in favor of the applied research. But I think that blue sky research has more potential for accidental discoveries than applied research. Whether that makes business sense for Bell, I am not sure. You see IBM has sold its pc division, it has world class applied research, but blue sky research is still there. Maybe the telcos really need to re-think their revenue generation strategy (treating the Internet as still an app of telephony won't cut the deal anymore, never mind the monopolies) and do not winge about money going to theoretical research. Another sign of the 'I have too many managers with MBAs' effect. Ah well.
"Jamie points out this list of Bell Labs' accomplishments at Wikipedia, including little things like the UNIX operating system"
Well, everyone is allowed to have at least one screw up!
And movies. We sell lots of movies to each other. And music. Don't forget music. These are the engines of our economic prosperity.
Has anybody ever thought that the measurements of economic prosperity are amazingly stupid? Warner Music is still profitable, therefore we'll be ok? Or, Warner Music's profits are down, quick, shore them up with draconian copyright laws because if they go down, our prosperity will take an irreparable hit?
Stupid.
First, Alcatel Lucent is a French company, listed on a French stock exchange (it's ADRs also trades in the US) so griping about North American IP laws is not only topically irrelevant, it's geographically irrelevant as well.
Second, Alcatel has been unprofitable for two straight years. It's burned through 10% of its cash reserves in those two years, and has nearly doubled it's long term debt. I don't care what type of company you're running, unless your an American automaker, you can't keep putting up numbers like that and stay in business.
Third, As many people have already pointed out, much Bell Labs research funding was enabled by AT&T's monopolization of the American telecom market until the 1980s. AT&T's breakup created competition, and when you have competition, you trim the excess fat so you can remain profitable. In fact, it's been rather a wonder that Bell Labs fundamental research arm has survived the company's many sales and acquisitions to this point.
Yes it sucks that a brilliant part of Bell Labs is slowly going the way of the dinosaur. It was a perfect example of private enterprise utilizing its resources for the public good (ok maybe not entirely since they owned patents on the research). That said, you can't expect a company to bankrupt itself for the sake of science. There are tens of thousands of employees whose jobs depend on Alcatel turning a profit at some point in the near future. Think about them.
The sun beams down on a brand new day, No more welfare tax to pay, Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light...
Why is this tagged USA? Alcatel-Lucent is a French company.
I remember a lot of slashdot readers complaining that Government should get out of basic research and let private industry do it. Sure, some basic research can be done by private industry but as we see from this news piece, private industry has no real immediate interest in funding basic R&D. That's why, slashdot readers, we need some of our taxes diverted to fund basic R&D. For those who hate that thought, remember that we only contribute about 8 cents each per day for the National Science Foundation. Another way to look at this that we spend as must in two weeks in Iraq as we spend on basic R&D for a whole year.
James D. Johnston was working at Bell Labs when he did his groundbreaking work on perceptual audio encoding. I believe Johnston's "PAC" ("Perceptual Audio Coder") was the first ever perceptual encoder. At the time, his work was regarded as impractical; now it's universally accepted. MP3, AAC, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, all use perceptual techniques to shrink encoded file sizes. (If you can't hear something, they throw it away to save bits. Signal/noise ratios don't matter as much as the subjective "how good does it sound to humans?")
Much of the work on MP3 and AAC was done at Bell Labs as well. See: MP3 and AAC.
I spent a year working for "JJ" Johnston. He's a nice guy and I want to see him get his props.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
My impression that pretty much *everyone* is getting out of the game.
The new model appears to be spinning companies and patents out of research universities. This wasn't so common when Bell Labs was in its heyday. So, it's not like a vacuum is being left.
Deregulating telecom and breaking up AT&T did wonders for telephone customers, but it did not do good things for smart people with big budgets.
That's OK, those people only ever wanted to pay for telephone service, not smart people playing. Sure, good things came from it, but the people were coerced into paying for it.
Remember, most of the important innovations were money-saving for Ma Bell, so they had financial interest for doing it anyway. In a competitive market, somebody who can offer data transit (not voice calls anymore) for less than their competitors' cost are going to rapidly gain market share. If that's too big for any one provider to bite off, they can form a consortia to do the research, sponsor university research, aggregate existing patents, etc.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
IMO, fundamental research should be financed with tax money and be released in public domain. Big-ass corporate research labs patent everything and patenting fundamental research is about as evil as it gets as far as patents are concerned, because it's the cornerstone of entire fields of applied research and product development.
Applied research should probably become a part of product development, too. I.e. in a product team, you'd have a couple of researchers interested in the problem space who would suggest novel ways of doing things, with emphasis on practical aspects.
I live in this small town, at the top of the hill is a large edifice to modern technology. The town's zipcode is immortalised in "The C Programming Language" book. K&R both used to be seen in the local Friendly's.
Things are different now, though. The huge carparks have been empty for years, some of the multiple entrances are often closed on workdays. I have been in the buildings and they smell of history, but sadly they don't smell of the future. This story is simply the black filling in the final period in a long story. The fact is the place has done little of it's famous research in more than a decade. It's an empty shell of a place. C was created there, Unix too, even C++. Many local businesses have failed or moved out as the Labs have withered away. The gist of this story is long overdue.
If you are a reader of Asimov it looks like the galactic empire's fall as well. Slowly but surely, science and technology stagnate, innovation dries up, people no longer understand how their technology works as they get lazier and more complacent, and soon enough, you collapse.
I think the wind is whistling through the trees now, and the rotten trunk, which no one can see yet, will snap soon enough. My company is having a terrible time finding computer engineers, and every time we go to universities to recruit we are tolled that enrollment in math and science nationwide continues to drop. Not trying to bash on "marketers" or "business majors" here, because there is some need for those people, but man, we need a lot less of them. Too bad everyone in college these days is more concerned about four years of fun than a good education, because if that's your motivation, it's business studies over engineering any day.
Sadly enough, there's no Hari Seldon around to spawn a second technological empire, either.
Note: For those wondering what series I cited, it is the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
I happen to work for a division of Alcatel-Lucent, in fact I work for one of the few divisions that is still profitable. The company as a whole is hurting, the heads both in America and in France (Alcatel is based primarily out of France) recently stepped down. Throughout the entire company, they are cutting costs as much as they can. I'm seeing with my own eyes that they'd rather leave a facility understaffed and underfunded in order to save money this quarter than invest a bit of money so there can be a next quarter. For example, they won't hire any additional staff to help with our ever increasing turnaround time on repairs, so customers are getting unhappy. The factory in France has decided to switch to sea freight, adding to our already ridiculous lead time. They've begun outsourcing manufacturing of parts, and then not testing units after being assembled at the factory, leading to a very high out-of-box failure rate. They've even all but stopped using crates for some very large units, leading to alot of damage in transit and rejected claims due to insufficient packaging. From what I can see, it's only going to get worse. The biggest problem I can see is that most of the administration thinks it's a great idea to cut costs and save this quarter, and because most of the staff (from what I've seen) understands this is no way to prosper, they're looking for more secure positions elsewhere rather than stay and wait in fear of a layoff.
Having worked at Bell Labs, Holmdel back in the '80s, not only does the shutting down of basic research at the 'Labs sadden me, but Lucent dumping that beautiful Eero Saarinen designed building in Holmdel and allowing it to be torn down really bothers me..
Holmdel was magnificent. Seeing pictures of it's last days, with the atrium forest dying, the building getting into horrible shape, and the places I was so familiar with turning to rubble actually affects me emotionally.
With the final shut down of basic research at the Labs we are finally seeing the true results of the break-up of the old Bell System 01JAN1984 by Judge Greene. There are no companies left with the income and drive to support good, large scale basic research in the United States. It was more than just Ma Bell who died that day.
--Tomas
That, and, IIRC a federal law that obliged it to finance research with 50% of its profits in exchange for the monopoly.
As I recall it wasn't a requirement that they do research. It was permission to include the cost of research related to telephony in their cost of doing business - on which they got to set monopoly phone rates so they got a specified rate of return (6% if I recall correctly).
The result was that the more money they spent on research, the more profit they made.
So they set up Bell Labs to spend as much money as possible, on anything even vaguely related to telephony.
And it "was an abysmal failure". From year one they made more money on the results of the work (by things like licensing patents) than it cost to run the labs. So basic research was profitable all by itself. B-)
But this counterintuitive effect also has a counterintuitive downside. The rewards for a research project start once it's done and keep coming in for quite a while after it's finished. Most of us would consider this good. But the Harvard Business School approach to management comes into play: The incentive structure on managers is to show as big a profit as possible for a few years and move on, thus looking better than your predecessors and successors and getting progressively better paying positions. So by killing the CURRENT research and just collecting on the results of the previous work they can cut their costs to near nothing while the benefits keep rolling in. For a while. Then they move on. Without new work the revenue gradually dries up and their successors take the rap. (And their successors would have to increase costs while the income was ramping down, which would look even worse, to turn things around.)
Regardless:
Without the guaranteed profit they're in the same boat as every other large cashflow company in the world. Perhaps basic research would continue to be profitable beyond the dreams of avarice. But there are other profitable things to do with the money where the return is more visible in advance, rather than crapshooting on what basic research might come up with. So (like all those other companies), the new generation of management reacts to the new situation by doing the standard thing - which doesn't include basic research.
(And it doesn't help that they already went through the "cut expenses and look good on the return on old work" phase a few years back. IMHO this is the house of cards coming down.)
= = = =
As I understand it, Xerox PARC had something similar going on but for a different reason: a strange accounting system.
One of the first things PARC did was to design a "new control panel" (and brain) for Xerox copiers. This replaced a bunch of relay logic with a microcomputer/early logic chips. And that saved a LOT of money.
PARC got credited with that savings on all the copier products sold from then on (and with similar stuff it did later). So it could spend money hand-over-fist on whatever it wanted and still look profitable.
(This was the same accounting department that, if I've got THIS right, screwed up big time when Xerox went into the mainframe business as the first company to take on IBM's core business, 'way back in the early days of "foreign attachments" opening up the IBM big-iron market. They built a CPU. After a while they decided that they were in the red on it big time, folded the division, and sued IBM on antitrust. In those days equipment was all leased. As a result of the suit IBM got hold of their accounting info and discovered the hadn't really understood how to interpret lease income. They were actually VERY profitable, and had folded the division because of this accounting screwup. Of course this discovery folded the suit.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
i'm all in favour of fundamental research. I think fundamental reseach is "blue-sky" research.
If you have the money/resources, go for it. It MIGHT yield results but most often it doesn't.
I think it's more like knowledge for the greater good of mankind.
Someone made the point that because Bell/AT&T had a monopoly, they had money to burn.
Nowadays, fundamental research in physics is big money, while in the past, it's not quite so expensive.
Maybe, fundamental research should be taken in some other area other than physics. Maybe some area where it's less expensive.
The problem is that the government doesn't fund research... Unless your lab is tied to the defense dept. you won't get funding.
While I'll agree that there isn't enough money for scientific funding, to claim that the government doesn't fund any non-defense related research is absurd. Have you heard of the DOE, NSF, or NIH?
Yeah, what this one says. And not even all DOE labs are weapons-oriented. Lawrence Berkeley Lab has (in part because it's in Berkeley, for Pete's sake!) taken a tack of not working on weapons, and indeed, generally not working on classified stuff. (Full disclosure: I collaborate on some stuff with people at LBL.)
And departments you might not think of at first are involved in physics research. Even the Department of Commerce is involved, through its NIST and NOAA departments, in everything from nanotechnology to neutrons to geophysical fluid dynamics.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
I would argue that decisions like this are to a large extent the result of a way of thinking specifically associated with business schools and their MBA graduates. It is a type of thinking that looks at the operations of businesses through the lens of a limited set of parameters, as if these parameters can be a substitute for concrete knowledge of the nuts and bolts details of a company's operations. MBA thinking causes managers to close their minds, to limit their decisions to what is immediately measurable and graphable. Extreme adherents to this way of thinking often fail to see the big picture in their business and in the economy.
The best example of this that I can think of occurred during the Mad Cow crisis in the UK a few years ago. In the lead-up to that crisis, MBA manager types were loathe to listen to the warning signs about growing incidents of BSE found in British cattle. They didn't want to act because they feared it would have a drastic impact on their bottom line profits. Although they clearly saw the huge costs of pre-emptive action to deal with the disease, what they failed to see were the costs of inaction. They didn't understand that their inaction would lead to the destruction of the entire British cattle stock. They failed to see that the British meat industry would remain a pariah for many years to come. They failed to balance the huge cost of acting pre-emptively with the destruction of their entire industry as a result of inaction.
Another example occurred when Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard changed that corporation from one of the most creative companies in the world to a commondity PC maker, whose main contribution to the economy is in marketing and distribution. More recently, Maple Leaf foods of Canada has had to institute a massive meat recall, due to Listeria contamination. The contamination was due to its nickel and diming of its quality assurance and sanitation departments. This recall, and the ensuing lawsuits could result in the destruction of the company. All caused because bean counters wanted to save a few dollars on bacterial testing and cleaning.
I am saying what I am because I genuinely believe it. I believe that the people running most of our corporations have little sense of history, of culture, and little sense of what actually makes our economy work. I once had a conversation with an MBA type in which he argued that food was not economically important because it only made up 3% of the Gross Domestic Product. I'd like to see what would happen if he reduced his food budget to zero.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
US Manufacturing died first. If you never plan to build anything in your own factories, why would you invest in learning about new ways to build things? Manufacturing economies are the only ones with incentives to do fundamental research - why should the US care anymore about science? This comment is meant to be a little bit of a troll, but as a PhD EE, I also see that the cut of funding of research in the physical sciences is the logical conclusion to the trend of the outsourcing of manufacturing.
the idealist has lofty goals, but will not sully himself with wordly concerns, and winds up doing nothing
he does however, heap scorn on the realist, who actually gets something done by working within the messy parameters of the world before him, and actually makes progress work. the realist does not achieve the high-impossible goals of the idealist, but he sets the groundwork so later generations can reach ever closer to the ideal
this conflict defines much of what goes on in politics and ideology. the idealist is merely a mental child, stunted in growth over his inability or refusal to deal with the ugliness of reality. he is also very loud, very whiny, its all he does. the realist is quiet, too busy working, actually getting something done
the idealist believes he is holding on to a concept the realist has forgotten. the realist fully understands the concept the idealist thinks he has a monopoly on. the realist is merely too busy working towards the ideal the idealist merely whines about to rebut the idealist. its a waste of time to engage an idealist. they are merely mental damage to be routed around and ignored
its not even really important the final redoubt of the idealist, how he thinks he is actually serving mankind: keeping the flame, holding on to lofty ideals in the face of those who compromise them to get stuff done. this is not really a worthy effort. that's because idealism is simpleminded, it is a form of fundamentalism. it is something that any 14 year old can discover independently and grasp completely, and many do. with luck, that 14 year old will realize he needs to be realistic. otherwise, he remains an idealist, stunted in growth, the immature waste reborn anew in every generation. very loud, very useless people
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
http://xkcd.com/435/
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
If the transistor was patented in the 1920's, please give us the patent number so we can look this up.
On schedule to finish the space station? You expect a multinational effort involving launching shit into space and connecting it with other shit in space is easy and easily schedulable? I have friends that worked on the collider in tx and there's a lot going on there that had nothing to do with willingness or support. You might have a point on breeder reactors - but all I hear about breeder reactors is how good they could be... I can't believe /. considered the parent post insightful.
This is truly sad disturbing and depressing news. This sort of mentality, where anything that doesnt make instant profits is ignored and is unfunded, is what is killing us. Without research, pure research into different technologies and sciences which do not necessarily have any apparent immediate commercial value, many technologies will remain undeveloped, it is harmful in the long run since many of the most profitable and commercially viable technologies that come from research that has no apparent immediate profit value. Its this greedy shortsighted mentality that is our undoing in so many areas and why it seems we are doomed. Not only in this instance but in regard to oil dependance, alternative energy and so many other things. This is sort of a republican mentality about things, very shortsighted, no tolerance for science, everything somehow has to make profits for corporate CEO yachts, even if it pre-empts future developments which corporations used to make their wealth, like the transistor.
This has been coming for years. Bell Labs had been bleeding talent at least since 2002, maybe even earlier. My undergraduate advisor at Uni was a brilliant scientist who fled Bell Labs (in '02) as the culture changed.
Oh please. Can you show me a single autobiography that isn't "a little braggadocious"? Geez, what a weak smear effort.
Before you go putting your faith in others, why don't you try taking the incredible leap of actually reading the material for yourself? The fact is, it's an outstanding book. Had the U.S. actually comprehended what Myles did during WWII, and used the same techniques from China in Vietnam, we would've had the population behind us there, instead of hostile to us. It wasn't until the modern Iraq invasion that the Army FINALLY took the textbook examples from Myles and adopted them. And that was only after the U.S. started getting its butt kicked, and looking like it was going to get thrown out.
Read the book, and it will put in perspective the subsequent U.S. policy for the next 50 years. Myles didn't make his efforts up; they are well documented elsewhere, and are a MAJOR reason why the U.S. had the support of the Chinese civilians during WWII.
Honestly, your smear campaign really smacks of outstanding ignorance, and makes you look like a complete idiot. Just trying reading, learning and forming your own opinion.
Now, this doesn't even get into the issue about Myles' observations about the transistor. Basically, if you bother reading the relevant part you might come away with a little understanding about why your attempt to smear Myles is really rather pathetic. The part in question has no relevance to bragging. Rather, it's a simple observation and an interesting statement made in passing.
Honestly, try educating yourself a bit before you try sounding semi-intelligent. You really sound like an idiot who's trying to sound important, without the slightest clue of what he's talking about.
I worked at AT&T Bell Labs in Indianapolis from 1987 through 2003 and I still miss working there. I learned more from those years working with a bunch of amazingly intelligent people than I would have ever learned in college (I'm not a graduate), they were all great mentors. We got to "play" with some of the coolest tech ever and got paid to do it. It truly is a sad day :-(
It isn't the business schools, it's the people. Good MBA programs focus on improving the value of a business, both long and short term, which requires nuts-and-bolts knowledge. Unfortunately, the most self-centered folks in the USA (or greater, for all I know,) figure a business education will show them how to use the capitalist system to their advantage, working toward doing whatever is needed to stroke their egos, including writing a resume that inflates their "paper-route" to "managing district distribution and revenue collection functions for a citywide printing enterprise." The board or powers-that-be of their prospective employer are often too busy to see past the smoke, or are too limited in thought to look outside of their limited search, and end up employing the great, lying, salesman as a manager in a position needing critical thought rather than the extremely qualified candidate who is very slightly outside of their nanoradian focus. I've seen similar thinking in many HR departments - someone with no direct experience but lots of otherwise stellar relevant experience is passed over in favor of someone who had years of lackluster experience.
Back to the Executive cycle - Once the egotistical, lying, salesman has his position, the folks with MBAs who adhere to principles such as long-term-profitability, accounting standards and procedures, risk management, and sustainability are shown the door, since unexpected large short term profits get a bigger ego boost to the egotistical lying salesman than sustained long-term above-sector-average performance. Thus, long term profitability is traded for short term results, and the lying, egotistical salesmem get bonuses and severance packages.
This cycle is self-perpetuating, since the egotistical, lying, salesman hires (or is hired by) folks with similar personality attributes, even though they may be unqualified for the position, so that there is mutual support of their incompetent decisions. After these folks wring all of the short term profit out of a particular business, and everyone realizes what happened, they resign, and move on to looking for the next job, with a resume bullet of "increased profitability XX% in X quarters", which others who are too lazy to research will find impressive, and then hire to run their business (in to the ground), restarting the cycle.
Not that I have personally seen it, or anything like that...
Actually, we have slightly more nuanced picture over here (Europe). The proverb is that America has the world's five best universities, but also 500 of the worst ones.
Well there's about 2700 4-year colleges and universities in the U.S., so you're missing about 2200 of the pretty-good to really-good to great ones. That's one reason the U.S. has such a strong system...step below those top 5 universities and there are hundreds that are still very good.
Many of them are publicly funded to keep costs low. You mention Berkeley, which is typically ranked the #1 public university in the U.S. If you live in California your tuition at Berkeley is going to be about $9000 per year. What's the next few below Berkeley? UVA, UCLA, Michigan, USC, UNC, William and Mary...all with in-state tuitions around $10k, all world-class institutions.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Will they all move to Micro$oft research...
Will this be all that will be left to us...
This may be true. But two points:
1) Chinese is written in Kanji (pictograms). What little Kanji I learned while living in Japan worked in China as well, even though Japanese is a completely different language (and yes, I know about Hirigana, Katakana, and Romaji, but the point remains ... a picture of a fish remains a picture of a fish, even if it is abstracted and has gone through a cubist phase). So being able to read the same pictograms from a thousand years ago today just means the pictogram meaning hasn't changed much, not that the language hasn't changed.
2) Even if the language hasn't changed, that doesn't mean the civilization hasn't seen its ups and downs (or even interruptions). It may mean that Mandarin is less susceptible to linguistic drift for whatever reason (cultural rigidity, writing in pictograms, grammatical self-correction, whatever). I don't speak a word of Mandarin, so I don't know one way or the other, but one thing is certain: lack of linguistic change doesn't mean a civilization hasn't ended and been rebooted, or even replaced.
In short, the culture may have endured longer than the "civilization."
Of course, all this depends on how you define civilization. 1000 years of darkness brought down upon Europe is commonly thought of as a break in civilizations, but one could argue that European civilization goes back uninterrupted to the ancient Greeks, and gloss over those little ups and downs like the sacking of Rome and the thousand years of cultural genocide that was the Christian faith.
These things are fuzzy at best, and aside from bragging rights on whichever side of Eurasia you sit, probably not worth arguing over.
What is perhaps worth considering is why, when China discovered America hundreds of years before Europe, and gunpowder thousands of years earlier, was it the European cultures that took these discoveries and turned them into spaceflight, guns, and a world empire. China wasn't any less greedy or Imperial, or any more moral, so what was it?
I suspect it was a combination of things, such as open political discourse, a move toward some form of rudimentary representative democracy, relatively wide adoption of the scientific method, and a rejection of religious political supremacy, things we often lump together under the term "the enlightenment."
Whatever "it" is, are we losing it now that we're turning our back on basic research and, more fundamentally, the scientific method (a la creationism in the US and "cultural tolerance" -- read, pandering the communicable mental illness in the form of irrational, often violent, and almost always intolerant, religions -- in Europe, and a stifling political correctness on both sides of the Atlantic that forbid people from speaking obvious truths openly, for fear of being branded racist/intolerant/islamaphobic/anti-christian/communist/socialist/whatever)...at just such a time that India and China are starting to adopted "it"?
Not sure where I come down on all this...these are probably questions that would make for several doctoral thesis for those interested, but it is interesting to ponder.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
As I understand it, SOX (Sarbannes-Oxley) is just a records-keeping law: accounting information must be retained for at least 5 years to allow for forensic research in case of fraud. How is that impacting companies wanting to do research ?
Bell Labs didn't invent the laser. Gordon Gould did. The courts awarded him inventor status back in the 1990s, along with many millions of dollars from Bell. Such a monumental invention at least should be attributed to the true inventor!
I know its "in fashion" to hate America and stereo type Americans as club wielding hate machines that dont do anything except for "profit" or "oil", but a lot of American innovention came from "foreigners" who came to our country to ink out a life that the failed social states of Europe simply couldnt/wouldnt provide. ...
The United States is more welcoming to foreigners.
Do you REALLY believe what you write?
Or did you mean "more welcoming to highly qualified foreigners"?
Well, that sure links pretty nicely to the "profit" stereotype.
You may think I kid, but Germans hate the Turks and the Poles (and other Eastern immigrants),
The 90ies called and want their cliches back. Overall the turks have integrated nicely (most of them live in germany now in the second generation) and "hate", if you can call is so, is probably more common against managers and their outsourcing decisions. But well, that problem is solving itself as the costs go up and due to lack of quality in eastern european nations and china.
This will be like chum for all the Microsoft-basher sharks out there, but this seems to be an interesting opportunity for a well-endowed foundation like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It's a bit outside their more humanitarian approach to grant-giving, but spending a billion to pick up a first-class fundamental research group sounds like it fits in with the foundation's goals of furthering education and knowledge.
Oh, and some mention was made earlier in the discussion of Unix coming out of Bell Labs. While this is true, it didn't come out of the Physics lab. So computer science developments should still be coming out of Bell Labs, though probably at a trickle compared with the glory days.
We are the 198 proof..
I work for an R&D department. Nothing we're working is even remotely advanced, just ways of rehashing the same old crap...
Sorry. Couldn't resist.
The above quote is so absurd that I have to respond. Are you bloody serious?!! ATT never made any money off the transistor?!!!! I'd like to see ATT run its telephone systems without the transistor, or its decendant the microchip! This illustrates a fundamental flaw in business school thinking, that they usually only consider direct profits of self-interested entities, and not the profits of society as a whole.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Bell Labs gave us so much. I'm sad to see it go. Hopefully something good will rise from the ashes.
> Bell Labs Kills Fundamental Physics Research
All those people who bought Lucent stock because of those ads bragging about how they invented the laser, transistor, etc. should get their money back.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The Thrill is Gone.
Besides, why invest in R&D when there's more money to be made in market manipulation? (Anyhow, it's probably easier to bandy about a few lobbyists at congress and get laws made in your favor than to do anything actually remarkable. Seems to be the trend amongst the larger corporations these days.)
Even a cursory look at Chinese history shows lots of major interruptions.
China wasn't even unified until roughly 200BCE, and quickly collapsed into another Dynastic regime that lasted about four hundred years. At which point it collapsed into several kingdoms - a period that lasted three hundred years. Seven hundred years and two dynasties later it was conquered by the Mongols, whose rule lasted a hundred years. In the seventeenth century, that dynasty was destroyed by another in a war that cost about twenty five million lives.
Once into the 19th century, China was almost continuously wracked by war, with millions upon millions of lives lost to many rebellions. The last imperial dynasty died as the country was caught in the throes of revolution across the country. For fifty years during the 20th century it was a democracy, and largely as a result of WWII it became a communist state.
So, out of curiosity, where in there can you claim that China has survived for thousands of years without major interruption? The idea that China is uninterrupted comes largely from the ignorant idea that all of China is the same, and it's done nothing particularly novel in those two thousand years - basically from a general lack of sensitivity and understanding of their culture or history that we have of Europe.
[Ego]out